When Your World Falls Apart, It Might Be Falling Into Place

What to do when the ground disappears beneath you

It’s devastating when you lose something you worked hard for. Something you put your energy, heart and soul into.

• The career you carefully built, gone in a restructuring you never saw coming.

• The job you loved made unbearable by a new manager.

• The business you poured yourself into, its pipeline suddenly running dry, no matter what you try.

• The relationship of many years ended because someone else decided to move on.

• A friendship you trusted, gone quiet, or gone cold.

• A diagnosis that rearranges every plan you had. A home, lost to fire or flood or storm.

The abrupt change comes in different shapes, but the feeling is the same: the ground you were standing on just isn't there anymore.

If you're in it right now, sense that it’s coming, I want to offer you something other than the story you're probably telling yourself.

The Story We Tell Ourselves

Sometimes the change comes without warning. But often, if we're honest, there are signs. A job that stopped feeling right, long before it ended. A relationship where something was already off, even if it wasn't spoken about.

We see it, and we don't always act on it, and then the decision gets made for us.

Either way, the first instinct is the same: this is the end of something, and maybe the end of me. It's tempting to believe your whole world has fallen apart and that you won't recover. That belief feels true because the loss is real. But it isn't the whole story.

What if it's Happening For You, Not Too You?

This is the mindset shift I come back to, again and again, with the women I work with: the most powerful thing you can do when something happens is to treat it as something that is happening for you, rather than to you.

I know it sounds like a stretch when you're standing in the wreckage. I've spoken with people who lost their homes to fire or flood, certain at the time that nothing good could come of it, and yet every one of them eventually told me the same thing: it gave them the chance to start over. The loss cracked something open that needed cracking.

That doesn't mean skipping the fear. It’s important to allow yourself to feel the panic when it shows up. Feel the not-knowing. Let it move through you without letting it take over.

There are two things I've learned to do when the unexpected hits.

First, ask what you need to learn from it. Not "why me?" because that question keeps you a victim of the situation. "What do I need to learn?" puts you back in relationship with it. It's the question that lets something good come from this, for you specifically.

Second, borrow an affirmation when you can't find your own words. I lean on this one from Louise Hay: out of this situation only good will come, for the highest good of everyone. I am safe. It doesn't ask you to solve anything. It asks you to trust that something good is already on its way, and let that be enough for now.

A Personal Story

I know this from the inside. Years ago, my first husband told me he'd been seeing someone else. I'd sensed something was wrong for a while and had pushed him to talk about it, because I knew we couldn't keep going as we were. He left. I lost the home I couldn't afford alone, the car he'd written off, and I was left owing money on a loan for a car I no longer had.

It felt, at the time, like my world had ended. But looking back now, it was the catalyst that forced me to focus on myself and what I actually wanted, instead of handing my power to someone else. I'm more myself, and more fulfilled, than I ever would have been if things hadn't broken apart the way they did.

You Don't Have to Carry it Alone

One more thing, and it might be the most important: let yourself receive support. So many of us assume we have to get through difficult times by ourselves.

I grew up without that kind of support from my family, so for a long time I didn't think or know how to ask for it from anyone. It's part of why I care so much now about building a community where support is simply there, without judgment, whether or not you have people in your own life to lean on.

Dramatic change does not have to be the end of your story. It can be the thing that transforms it.

Reflection

Where in your life right now might something be happening for you, even though it doesn't feel that way yet?

If This Resonates

If you're in the middle of a chapter like this and want a clearer sense of how you move through change, and what's actually trying to come through on the other side of it, a Personal Energy Reading is a gentle place to start.